“Oh!”
“Not to mention the fact that we need to think offense as well as defense. The Antima are evil, and they need to go.”
Greta winced at the angry edge in Div’s voice. She touched the raw amethyst pendant at her throat, to center herself. Love and light.
“Okay, well… say that the Antima did write those shadow messages,” she said after a moment. “But they don’t use magic. They’re anti-magic. So who enchanted the messages, and why? And what does 1415 mean?”
“Aysha googled 1415 on our way here. A lot of random things came up. Like, the year 1415 was the beginning of the Hundred Years’ War in France; some king invaded someone else’s kingdom. Nothing relevant.” Div swept her white-blond hair over her shoulders. “We should perform some scrying spells to see if ‘1415’ is part of someone’s personal information. Maybe it belongs to the author of the shadow messages?”
“Good idea.” Greta shifted in her seat. “So, I’ve been wondering… Who at the school might know that we’re witches?”
“Speaking for myself and my girls, no one. We’re very careful.”
“So are we.”
“Right, uh-huh.”
Div’s tone was skeptical, arrogant. As usual. But Greta wasn’t going to bite.
“And who do we know at our school who are Antima, or who might be Antima?”
“There’s Brandon Fiske, of course,” Div pointed out.
“And this morning before homeroom, I saw these two guys wearing the shoulder patches. One of them was Axel Ngata. The other one was named Orion; Binx said his last name is Kong. She thought they were just posers, but…”
“Kong. He’s in my algebra class. Okay, so that’s three possible Antima members that we know of. Let’s go back to the 1415 spell. Do you know of any witches at the school besides us?”
Greta hesitated. She thought about the girl from this morning. Iris Gooding. Could she have enchanted the shadow messages?
Greta wanted to meet her, learn more about her, and, if she was a witch, invite her to join their coven. Unless, of course, she was connected to the shadow messages and the numbers. But likely, Div would want to ask Iris to join her coven, as well. If she knew about Iris’s existence. Which, hopefully, she didn’t.
“Not really, no,” Greta lied. “Do you?”
“No.”
Greta wondered if Div was lying, too. She closed her eyes and tried to read Div’s emotional state. This was a magical skill she’d been cultivating for a while, and sometimes, it provided her with useful information.
But not today. Not with Div. As usual, she was inscrutable, a wall of deep shadows.
Greta opened her eyes and blinked against the sunlight. “So what do we do now? What’s our plan?” she said out loud.
“Why don’t we split it up?” Div suggested. “Why don’t my girls and I look into Orion Wong and Brandon Fiske and Axel Ngata, see if we can trace the shadow messages to any of them? You and your girls can try to figure out if there are any new witches at our school who may have enchanted the shadow messages… or witches who aren’t new who’ve managed to keep their identities a secret.” She added, “And we should all keep an eye out for additional Antima members. There may be more of them beyond the three.”
“Okay. Sure.” Greta pointed. “My street is the next left. Junipero Serra Drive.”
“Yes, I remember.”
Greta remembered, too. Back in eighth grade, they used to spend a lot of time at each other’s houses: making teas out of herbs in Greta’s garden, writing spells in code in their diaries, concocting potions out of random ingredients and storing them in empty lotion bottles… basically freelancing it, since Callixta’s book had not made its way into the world yet. They’d also done a lot of non-magic stuff together. Like watching old black-and-white movies, drawing portraits of each other, and playing board games (neither girl liked losing).
Was it during Casablanca that Div had kissed her? Or Sunset Boulevard? Somehow, Greta had suppressed the details of that day.
“You can just drop me off here. I’ll walk,” she said abruptly.
“No problem, Gretabelle.”
It was Div’s old nickname for her.
Flushing, Greta grabbed her backpack and exited the Audi without saying goodbye.
Greta opened the gate that led to the backyard of her house and headed over to her garden. She needed to text Binx and Ridley to fill them in on her conversation with Div, explain about the assignments. But first, she wanted a moment to chill, to get her equilibrium back after the long, unsettling day.
Her garden always calmed her. She set aside her bag and knelt down on the grass. The lawn was damp from a mayfly-brief shower that had passed through about an hour ago; the air smelled like rain and moss and lovely, unidentifiable green things. The wetness seeped through the knees of her thin wool tights, but she didn’t mind. She never minded getting messy when she was in nature… even if “nature” in this case was her family’s small backyard, boxed in by Mrs. Mianowski’s house to the right and the new neighbors’ house to the left.
The garden was called Bloomsbury. Greta had named it that because she wanted to inspire her charges to bloom, plus she’d learned about something called the Bloomsbury Group in a dusty old art book at her father, Tomas’s, used-book store, the Curious Cat. Bloomsbury was a neighborhood in London filled with elegant gardens. In the early 1900s, the writer Virginia Woolf, her sister Vanessa Bell, and other Bloomsbury artists and intellectuals had met regularly to have interesting discussions, create, and support each other’s work. Kind of like a coven.
Bloomsbury—her Bloomsbury—was not elegant, exactly. It was wild and overgrown,
